TAYLOR: N.S. farmers see power needs as grassroots issue

It isn’t as easy as burning lawn clippings, but some Nova Scotia farmers are hopeful grass will become a cheap, environmentally friendly heating source and cash crop.

In business these days, the key to staying profitable is keeping expenses down, and agriculture is no exception, says hothouse farmer Robert Parker.

Parker, owner of West River Greenhouses in Pictou County, says he uses wood pellets, which are less expensive than oil, but he is convinced that burning grass pellets could provide greater savings.

“I paid $8,000 for my last load of wood pellets. … That $8,000 is only about two-thirds what it would cost me on oil,” he told me in a phone interview Tuesday.

“So I’m saving a third of my costs by putting in wood pellets instead of oil, but I could save another … 20 to 25 per cent if we were able to produce our own fuel.”

Parker and his wife, Colleen, have been experimenting by growing different types of grasses and burning them their pellet furnace.

She says they tried burning some leftover wheat from Prince Edward Island once, but it didn’t work well and plugged the furnace.

Most recently, they have tried growing reed canary grass, but that gets beaten down by the snow and is difficult to harvest, she says.

Another option is to grow miscanthus giganteus, commonly referred to as elephant grass, which grows from a root or small plant.

Parker says he believes it may be a good option, and it has the added benefit of not spreading like a weed.

The elephant grass can grow to about 31/2 metres, and when the large leaves fall off, the bamboo-like stock can be harvested to make pellets, he says.

“It’s better than wood pellets because you have a new crop every year instead of every 20 years.”

Parker is concerned that wood will become an expensive commodity in Nova Scotia as large wood-burning biomass projects are built.

Pro Farm Energy has plans for a large-scale elephant grass farm that will eventually power a generator to sell electricity to Nova Scotia Power. Working in conjunction with Minas Basin Pulp and Power, the Ontario company is looking to rent about 4,000 hectares to grow the grass.

While there is only one grass-pellet producer in the province, Parker believes more pellet producers will be needed if grass is to become a viable energy option.

The grass is expensive to transport to the West Nova Agro Commodities pellet plant in Canning, he says, and doing so defeats much of the economic and environmental benefits of using grass as a heating source.

Should the pellet plant come first or the furnaces that burn the grass pellets?

The perfect grass-burning furnace doesn’t exist. Grass pellets often don’t burn completely and leave behind unburned remnants called clinkers that make a furnace less efficient.

On Tuesday, the province announced it would spend $787,200 to construct a new building for a grass pellet heating system at the Perennia Innovation Centre in Bible Hill.

Perennia Food & Agriculture is a government agency created with the merger of AgraPoint, the Atlantic BioVenture Centre and AgriTECH Park.

Part of the government’s plan for the research facility is to develop a better method of burning the pellets.

By encouraging farmers to convert some of their underutilized land to production of grass for fuel, the extra bit of income could make the difference between someone being a part-time or a full-time farmer, Parker says.

Some people are concerned about taking land out of food production in order to feed the grass-pellet economy as it grows, but it is doubtful grass will push fruits and vegetables off prime agricultural land, he says.

The goal is to use underutilized land, but if demand for local produce continues to grow, the grass can easily be plowed under and something more valuable grown instead, Parker says.